I haven't been on the forums in awhile. I found pepakura (a 3d interactive software) that can be used to build paper models in 3d! Of course this takes a lot of time, sizing (as in I found out the hard way if a kid makes it it won't fit me lol).

This started as a Phase 1 Clone Trooper. most of the peices are made, some have a layer of resin on them (holds the shape until you get material on them). I decided that fibre glass would probably break, so I have moved on to ballistic grade materials. I am not there yet, but if I can afford some HB80 dyneema this thing will stop .308's in their track if done correctly (and expensively). All or nothing right?. Pieces are going to be modified or swapped out, but the whole point of this post:

A) they seem very exact, whoever "unfolded" these did a very good job
B) even if they aren't 501st approved, they are great for custom costume building

I played with it a bit. I made a Master Chief helmet from Halo. The Halo costumers in the 405th Infantry division have done some fantastic stuff using pepakura. I haven't read through their forums in years so I don't know the current state of the art. I will say that having a source that is a polygon rendered character to start with is a big advantage for them. Clones (although entirely digital) are much smoother characters. Going from Pepakura to a clone will take a lot more finishing work to get it to look like what was on screen.

Pepakura is a fantastic tool, but it can be very labor intensive to get good results.